Many poultry recipes call for a flattened breast cut. Typically, the cook wants to flatten the breast without losing too much liquid so that the meat will not be dry after cooking. The most common way to prepare a flattened poultry breast is to hammer the breast with a mallet.
Hammering has drawbacks which include damaging the poultry meat, making a mess in the kitchen, fluid or pieces of meat may fly off of the breast or the mallet creating unsanitary conditions, a cook may become tired after hammering just a few breasts for the preparation of a meal, and it may be difficult for one person to flatten more than one piece of meat at a time.
Additionally, when flattening a batch of two or more poultry breasts by hammering it is likely that the flattened height of the hammered breasts in the batch will not be uniform and may vary significantly from one breast to another, particularly if there is variation in initial heights of the breasts in the batch.
Some cooking tools for meat may use rollers as conveyors to move cuts of meat or other ingredients from one part of an apparatus or one location in a kitchen to another and so forth. Other household tools such as a mop bucket or roller wringer may provide rollers pressed together and between which the mop rag may be passed to wring the mop dry by turning one of the rollers with a hand crank attached to the roller. Generally such roller wringers keep the rollers pressed tightly together to maximize the wringing force on whatever passes between the rollers to squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Thus conveyor rollers and wringer rollers are not generally well suited for flattening chicken or other poultry breasts.
There is a need, therefore, for a press to flatten poultry breasts or other cuts in such a way as to reduce the disadvantages encountered when hammering poultry breasts with a mallet. The present disclosure describes a press that may advantageously reduce the damage done to the meat in the flattening process in comparison hammering, may reduce the mess and unsanitary conditions of the kitchen, may use less physical exertion on the part of the cook, which may be adapted to flatten more then one cut of meat at a time, and which may allow a batch of two or more poultry breasts to be flattened substantially uniformly to approximately the same height regardless of their starting height.